Category — Fiction

Catherynne M. Valente writes on Invisible Games, mysterious pastimes that never came into existence. Read a few entries though, and their mystery won’t feel like fiction anymore. Here’s an excerpt from “The Loneliness Engine“, one of the better stories on the site:

In fifty-two living rooms, puzzled men and women stared at the board, trying to understand the patterns of light. And patterns there were: around 5:00pm, a great number of lights flashed on, so too around 9:00 am. During business hours there was mostly blackness on the board. Late in the night, clusters shone, and in the pre-dawn hours, there were always one or two. Slowly fifty-two souls began to realize that the tiny lights must ignite when other users turned their systems on, that each LED was another person who had seen the St. Paul ad, so was staring intently at the board, who was alone, who was like them.

Also highly recommended is “Killswitch“.

[Inspired by actual events.]

When I’m around attractive girls, I have a habit of making flowers out of napkins and giving them to the girl in question. It’s certainly corny, but the fragile bouquet seems so off-the-cuff and genuine that I think, or at least I like to think, that the receiver is pleasantly surprised. It’s easy really: you rip the napkin into a square, fold an inch or so down from the top, roll up the “stem”, pinch off the “petals”, and twist the rest all the way down to the end. It’s a simple gesture, but I’ve never made more than one for any given girl, with a single exception. This is her story.

Now, you might expect this particular girl to be exceptional in some way, but then you’d be wrong, because she was in fact exceedingly ordinary. She wasn’t my soul mate. She wasn’t my best friend, either. Hell, if you so much as asked me her name, I couldn’t tell you, even as I sit here writing about her at length. The truth is this: she was an employee at a nondescript pizza shop in northwestern Ohio. See, in that section of the state, restaurants are few and far between. And after a hard day’s work carrying cumbersome electronics around in a recently-abandoned school, I did not want to drive any farther than necessary to obtain food. My colleague suggested this particular pizza shop, and although I was extremely suspicious, I was also extremely hungry.

I looked around the interior of the place as we entered and I couldn’t help but notice her right away. Not because she was jaw-droppingly beautiful or anything, but simply because she was a female, the only one in the store. Cute, I thought, in a natural, relaxed sort of way. She looked like the standard “girl next door”, with her sand-colored hair pulled back in a pony tail, protruding from the hole in the back of her baseball cap. She played the part too; the easy way she talked with me as I decided between cheese and pepperoni made it seem as if we’d been friends since early childhood.

When I looked at her again with the intent of ordering, I noticed that her face, which from a distance had appeared relatively unadorned, was peppered with light brown freckles. Before I knew it, I was staring. Not because they were hideous, no, but because they made her seem even more unpretentious than I had first perceived, and therefore more attractive. This caught me by surprise, and I had to concentrate much harder than normal to maintain eye contact. As she spoke to me, I silently repeated my emergency mantra: Eyes! Eyes! I was screaming inside my own head. Eyes dammit! After several moments of stunned indecision, I somehow managed to order a small cheese pizza with a bottle of Coke.

As I sat down in a the small, greasy chair near the window, I contemplated flirting. Nah, you’re horrible at it. You’d just embarrass yourself. I decided instead to test the waters. I got up and walked toward the counter under the pretense of getting a napkin, but secretly trying to catch her eye. She was busy though, my ruse didn’t work, and I returned to my chair, useless napkin in hand.

Almost without thinking, I begin tearing off one of the corners to make a square. She looked up at me curiously. Only then did I connect the dots, and suddenly my hands sped up their handling of the napkin, in anticipation of the moment when I might give her the resultant flower. But my fingers, their precision gone after eight hours of heavy lifting, ripped the napkin in half just below the petals. No repair was possible. The girl behind the counter, the exceptional yet very ordinary girl, saw this and smiled in a way that suggested a cozy familiarity with my clumsiness. I could tell something good was just under the surface, some latent possibility we both wanted to unlock.

I tore off a new corner and began to make a new flower, being careful not to tear the fold this time. Two minutes worth of twisting and I was done. The stem wasn’t my best, but the petals were perfect; this one would suffice. Just as my hands had gotten ahead of me a few minutes earlier, my mind was already simulating the next steps. OK, flower’s ready. But how are you going to give it to her, you idiot? Wavering, I held the flower gently, as if I was holding our flirtation itself, afraid to handle it too harshly for fear that it might fall apart in my hands. I looked it over for a while, and stared at the patterns still visible on the petals. When she called my name I was still lost in thought, unprepared.

On my way to the front of the shop, I resolved to give her the flower and ask for her phone number. Shit, I thought, if it doesn’t work, I’ll probably never be back here again anyway. She was already placing the box on the counter when I got there. Smiling sheepishly, the girl looked as if she’d read my intentions in their every detail. As I grabbed my pizza, though, she turned and began walking toward the back of the store, so that I could no longer get her attention. My charming plan foiled, I sighed and consoled myself briefly. I was halfway to the door when I heard her call, “You forgot your drink.”

I walked, feigning casualness, back across the lobby to the refrigerator in the corner. As I fumbled with the logistics of holding the door open while also not dropping my pizza, she came around to the side of the counter and walked toward me. “I’ve got it,” I grunted, wanting to appear less frustrated than I was. “Here,” she replied, and relieved me of the pizza box. But as it slid out of my hands, so did the flower. It fell to the floor, and though the sound of its landing was nearly inaudible, I was sure it was the loudest thing in the room.

I stood transfixed and already beginning to blush with embarrassment as she carefully picked it up from the tile floor. She rose, examining the flower, and as her eyes became level with my own, I understood. The way she held the flower, the way she looked at me, the way she hesitated; it was obvious. She knew. We were both smiling at that point, she pleasantly and I abashedly. “Thank you,” I stammered, placing the flower in my pocket, as if I’d been meaning to do that all along. Her reply was almost a whisper, meant only for me: “Come back sometime, Adam.”

I walked slowly to the door. With my dinner securely in my hands, I pushed the latch open with my elbow, and glanced up one last time at the girl. She was walking back to the kitchen now, but as she passed the window, the fading sun near the horizon momentarily enveloped her in a golden aura of evening light. She glimmered, and her whole presence seemed to intensify. What was only meant to be a quick glance transformed, unwillingly, into a wide-eyed dreamy gaze. As she stepped farther, out of the bright sun, my eyes readjusted, and I could see she too had turned to look back. Our eyes met.

No longer embarrassed, but instead tranquil and content, I left the shop determined to remember her last gestures: a wink, and a blown kiss.

Have you ever been in a public place, seen someone you’ve never met before, and just knew? I’m not talking about love at first sight, this is something much more subtle. Something like looking at a stranger on the street, and just by their walk, their look, and their whole demeanor, you can just tell that you would be perfect for each other. The only trouble is: they haven’t noticed you yet. So what do you do about it? Well, you could do what Patrick Moberg did.

Mr. Moberg is a New York City illustrator who saw “the girl of his dreams” on the subway and made a website about the incident after he couldn’t work up the guts to talk to her. The girl was eventually found when one of her friends saw the website and put them in touch. Her name is Camille Hayton, and at the time she was working as an intern for a magazine based in New York. They went on a date, and it apparently went well, because afterward they wound up on Good Morning America and in Reader’s Digest.

Most of the time though, things don’t turn out that great. So what happens to all those guys who can’t muster up the courage to say anything? What happens to those guys who don’t make websites? Or what if they meet the girl of their dreams, and she reciprocates the feeling, but then the whole thing is ruined?

Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about myself, and - what I’d really like to do - explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock built when peace filled the world.

That was an excerpt from a short story by Japanese author Haruki Murakami in which he, like Patrick Moberg, doesn’t know what to say to his dream girl at first. But when he finally figures it out, it might be too late.